This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign, where Klaudia introduces you to 5 drivers that contribute to building more satisfaction in our careers so that you can reconnect and re-energise with your work in 2025. 

The 4th driver of happiness at work is Belonging.

This episode emphasizes the significance of belonging in the workplace and introduces listeners to three primary barriers—pace, proximity, and patterns—that hinder the formation of meaningful connections among colleagues.

Klaudia breaks down these barriers and offers actionable insights for overcoming them.

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Happiness Reset at Work campaign, part of the Happiness Challenge Podcast.

Also visit happinesschallenge.co.uk courses to learn more about my new online program to help you create an action plan for more fulfillment and impact in your work and in this short episode I share some practical hacks for strengthening our sense of belonging at work. If you are wondering why the sense of belonging is important to happiness and you are up for some reflections, listen to episode 142.

But now let's get practical.

In order to increase our sense of belonging at work, we need to challenge three specific barriers that are getting in the way of us forming meaningful connections and friendships at work. And these are pace, proximity and patterns. Just wanted to highlight that on purpose.

I have come up with three words starting with P which wasn't that easy. So very neat and I'm very proud of that. So pace.

We are moving at pace at work all the time and what happens is we deprioritize making connections because of the day to day demands proximity in the hybrid environment we often are not seeing people regularly or we rarely work in physical proximity next to them.

And patterns we operate on autopilot or following certain patterns and routines and simply talking and engaging with the same group of people at work, never really forming different connections outside of our day job. So my three ideas for action for you are the ones that can help you to break down those barriers.

So for pace, slow down the beginning of your meetings to pause and actually start a meeting by asking a curiosity question. For example, what are you looking forward to learning this week? Or what were the highlights of people week last week that boosted their energy?

Or what impactful conversations did people have last week? And those questions are quite broad so colleagues can decide whether to respond with personal or maybe work related examples.

But you starting your meetings with a pause to bond with other people, find out information about them and build those connections for proximity. Think about creating opportunities for connections and I really do mean that. Even if it means scheduling forced fun. And yes we cringing forced fun.

We don't want to do that. But frankly it can be simple things. But we bringing people together we breaking down the proximity.

So it could be 20 minutes to come together to exchange best gingerbread cookies recipes or 30 minutes to discuss a podcast episode that you have shared with your team or have a quick walk and talk meeting in the park near the office.

But again, we're creating opportunities which often in a hybrid environment are really difficult to come by to really make sure that we have time for those connections. And the third one patterns the idea for action here.

Break your routine of engaging with the same group of people by scheduling monthly curiosity conversations with someone new who you usually do not work with. Think about people outside of your team department sector.

Challenge yourself to not only talk to usual suspects, so I hope that you find all of those tips useful. Thank you again for listening to the Happiness Reset at Work campaign.

We are almost there and I hope that you were able to follow all of the episodes. I hope to see you at the next episode where I'll be talking to Kate Jones from Deeply Human about her experiences of building a sense of belonging.

I would love you to share this episode with others, especially maybe someone who is feeling quite isolated at their work or perhaps just started a new job. Often that's quite difficult to straight away to build those connections.

And remember to subscribe to my podcast and newsletter so you don't miss out on any future content. But thank you again for listening. I dare you to be happy. Bye.